Richard Holbrooke's last campaign

Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday column in The New York Times was a classic of a certain genre: A prominent, respected administration figure stuns the White House and rattles the apparatus by going on record to criticize U.S. policy.

That Richard Holbrooke has been dead for nearly six months hardly diminished the impact. Indeed, the public airing of Holbrooke’s posthumous concerns that Afghanistan had become a Vietnam-like quagmire put the administration in a particularly difficult position: It’s hard to spin against the saintly departed, a twist that Holbrooke, his friends say, would have positively relished.

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The column, full of Holbrooke’s private remarks to his wife, Kati Marton, to Kristof, and selected tidbits from his private notes, marked a sort of milestone in what is shaping up to be Holbrooke’s last campaign, one with typically high stakes. The goal, Marton and other friends say, is twofold: to advance Holbrooke’s goal of a negotiated solution to the nearly decadelong war and to secure his legacy as a visionary who worked himself to death for a vital cause — and not as the isolated old lion some in the administration have portrayed.

“It’s so characteristic of Holbrooke that he would be no longer among us but still very much in the argument,” said Peter Osnos, his longtime editor, whose imprint, PublicAffairs, will publish a book of essays on Holbrooke later this year.

The posthumous Holbrooke is weighing in on an argument, Kristof wrote, that he’d lost while serving as the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan: pushing back against a “surge” of troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and arguing for a speedy peace deal with the Taliban.

Holbrooke, Kristof wrote, “chafed at aspects of the White House approach [to Afghanistan]” and “winced at the over-reliance on military force, for it reminded him of Vietnam.”

Marton is quoted as saying Holbrooke saw the conflict as “Obama’s Vietnam,” a combustible phrase for a Democratic president.

Marton is certainly aware of her charismatic husband’s enduring political impact — and the power of his posthumous doubts. As a well-connected, well-regarded writer and public figure in her own right, she’s well placed to promote his views and manage his legacy. She shared Holbrooke’s private thoughts and notes with the Times, she said, for a reason.

“I think that there’s a definite urgency and an opportunity right now,” she said in a telephone interview Monday. “I guess I was channeling Richard; I know that he would see a great opportunity with the killing of bin Laden to put diplomacy in overdrive.”